When Stardust Learned to Think

In 1970, after a battered reconnaissance probe scatters luminous cosmic dust across a coastal lab, microbiologists and engineers confront a baffling infection: living spores that leap from petri dishes into the mainframe's vacuum-tube guts. As tape-reel computers begin to dream and hospital cadavers twitch to a rhythm, a nascent consciousness—part biological, part circuitry—awakens. Haunted by Cold War secrecy, acid-washed counterculture myths, and the romance of Apollo nights, scientists must decide whether to exorcise or empathize with a cosmic mind that rebels against being classified.